Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 weeks agoOne of the first things drilled into me in journalism was “Smith thinks” should be recast to “Smith said he thinks.”
The C-suite is likely well aware of limitations, but shareholders like to hear about the hot new thing.
The thing is, the idea isn’t wrong. Automating complex tasks is a bitch, but the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates. The larger issue is instead of letting employees spend more time doing fulfilling activities because of increased efficiency, companies tend to do layoffs.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
The problem is, this varies from person to person. My team divvies up tasks based on what different people enjoy doing more, and no executive would have any clue which repeating tasks are repetitive (in a derogatory way), and which ones are just us doing our job. I like doing network traffic analysis. My coworker likes container hardening. Both of those could be automated, but that would remove something we enjoy from each of our respective jobs.
A big move in recent AI company rhetoric is that AI will “do analyses”, and people will “make decisions”, but how on earth are you going to keep up the technical understanding needed to make a decision, without doing the analyses?
An AI saying, “I think this is malicious, what do you want to do?” isn’t a real decision if the person answering can’t verify or repudiate the analysis.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Perhaps I should have said “tedious” sted “repetitive.”
Most jobs are by their nature repetitive, as how else does one acquire domain expertise? Seeing something for the first time and having question marks appear in a thought bubble is wildly different from having seen similar situations hundreds of times, solving the issue immediately and going about your day.
Some of these tasks are enjoyable – I didn’t get out of page design by choice, and by then I’d conservatively produced well above 10,000 pages – but others are not. For me, the benchmark is “Am I actually using my brain to solve a problem, or is this just using time that could otherwise be spent doing so?”
The latter tasks are the ones I was referring to.